Captain Beefheart: I May be Hungry but I Sure Ain't Weird

More Beefheart. I thought maybe I'd said all there was to say about this album when I mentioned in connection with Electricity, the compilation that updates and expands it in some respects. There are just four tracks on this album that don't appear at all on Electricity: two versions of Safe As Milk and two instrumentals, On Tomorrow and Flowerpot.

There is a bit more, however. It turns out that one of the tracks I mentioned yesterday, Ice Rose, actually appears on this album (in a version recorded a decade earlier, and without the marimbas) under the title Big Black Baby Shoes. At the time of writing the fan site Captain Beefheart Radar Station says that Dirty Blue Gene is an early version of Ice Rose, but that is surely a mistake: Dirty Blue Gene is an early version of… Dirty Blue Gene, which also appeared over a decade later on the Doc at the Radar Station album. Are you following all this? No? Well, I've now read all sorts of things about which sessions ended up on the Safe As Milk, Mirror Man and Strictly Personal albums, and they don't all seem to tie up in a consistent story or chronology. But, anal though I am, I'm not anal enough to spend more time getting the story straight.

The one thing that does emerge from listening to recordings a decade apart back-to-back is that, with or without the repeated tunes, there is a consistent thread that runs through Beefheart's music, in the way that different elements (the two guitars, and the drums, or the marimba) seem sometimes to be playing different songs, yet somehow they lock together. The '60s recordings are rougher and bluesier; the '70s/'80s sound was cleaner and the production separates the instruments more clearly — but it's the same thing going on.

MusicBrainz entry for this album